Dancare
The City Dancare is one of the first great cities of the Van empire at the Western end of the Great Arc Sea. It was built with to be a vast mausoleum to the rulers and wealthy of the Van Empire and the City of Arc but in the centuries after the fall of Van it became a burial site for the wealthy and influential from across Aestis and beyond. The city is built on a series of terraces into the mountainous northern side of the Straits of Dancare. Tombs and crypts make up over 98 percent of all buildings in Dancare and only a tiny number of monks and archivists run the entire city. The higher terraces of Dancare are reserved for the rich, nobility and royalty, in the lower terraces families of the 'middling sort' sometimes can afford a small family crypt, and there is the odd space still left for paupers, provided for by charity. Various merchant guilds in Pelonastra, for example, as part of their recognised charitable duties will provide a few crypt spaces for the poor of the city, to save them from an unmarked pauper's grave. '''Shadryff''' Shadryff is the first level of Dancare. It combines the wharf where ships carrying the dead and their families dock, the houses of the dock porters that take off the living and the dead, two chapels to the saints, a few taverns and other amenities. It is a small, virtually silent sandstone town at the base of the cliffs and a token number of city guards are garrisoned here, not that they have much to do. The inhabitants of Shadryff earn a small living for themselves by keeping flaming beacons lit along the straits of Dancare, often sailing for a hundred miles or more, so that ships can pass safely during the night. The poor of Shadryff sell incense and blessed candles to people disembarking at the quay. History Religious Orders The monastic orders of Dancare. Dancare (City of the Dead, the Mausoleum, The Long Rest, The Western Door), is lightly populated. If it were a city of living souls it would have capacity for at least 100,000 individuals, but there are a maximum of 3,330 living human beings permanently living in Dancare at any one time, giving the city and eerie silence. There are five major orders of ascetics in the city, all of them dedicated to largely forgotten Aruhvian Saints (even after the Sundering and the return of the god of the dead The Beacon, these orders continued their work) with little or no antagonism from the Order of the Beacon. The monks of Saints: * Yever * Ordayn * Andras * Valis * Harross Tend the graves and tombs on the city's five different levels and are the keepers of artefacts and inheritances. The city accommodates several large libraries, storehouses and crypts where generations of precious objects are stored and sometimes reclaimed by loved ones and ancestors. Several old saintly chapels still ring bells for the dead and light beacons in the night (partly to steer ships through the straits of Dancare). The almost completely undefended city is seen by nearly every combatant power in the world as too sacred to attack, and so far has even avoided the attentions of Mordikhaan. Vaults Tombs Libraries Guardians